The Pope's "World Political Authority"

Forerunner, "WorldWatch," July-August 2009

On July 7, 2009, the Vatican released Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), his third, in which he writes of his desire that the world radically rethink the global economy in light of growing disparity between rich and poor, and establish a "true world political authority" to work for the "common good." Under current economic conditions, few question the need for a thorough review and alteration of the way the world handles its wealth, but his insistence on an international authoritative political body taking up this responsibility caught many pundits off-guard.

Among the churches of God—and among Protestant prophecy watchers, too—there were raised eyebrows and wondering commentaries regarding the imminent fulfillment of Revelation 13:11-18. Of course, whether this Pope is the "beast from the earth," better known as the False Prophet (Revelation 16:13; 19:20; 20:10), remains to be seen. Benedict's age and relatively low-key international profile tend to argue against it. In fact, whether this or any Pope will be the False Prophet is still an unanswered question; he could just as easily be a non-Christian advocate of a one-world religion.

Be that as it may, after reading or hearing the Pope's seeming proposal of one-world government, many people have questioned whether he was actually doing that. Perhaps to allow us to judge for ourselves, we should see his words in context:

In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth. One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making. This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority. . . ."

On its face, this paragraph appears to advocate a planetary government with the "real teeth" to implement sweeping and effective changes to the global economy, as well as to disarm bellicose states, distribute food evenly, keep the peace, protect the environment, and control migration. If so, it is an alarming prospect indeed, considering human corruption and fallibility over the course of history!

However, in "Is Benedict in Favor of World Government?" (First Things, August 20, 2009), Douglas A. Sylva, Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, argues that Benedict's call for "world political authority" presupposes the failure of the present attempt at world governance—the United Nations—and advocates a new one based on Christian principles. He quotes the end of the above paragraph from the encyclical:

The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater international ordering, marked by subsidiarity [giving subordinate governments the authority to oversee functions that they perform more effectively], for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order. . . ."

As Sylva puts it, "[His proposal] is in reality a profound challenge to the UN, and the other international organizations, to make themselves worthy of authority, of the authority that they already possess, and worthy of the expansion of authority that appears to be necessary in light of the accelerated pace of globalization." What would make such an international organization worthy of such heavy responsibility is, according to Benedict, "a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth." In other words, as the Pope makes clear in the remainder of the encyclical, a world government up to the task would have to respect the right to life of every individual and promote virtuous, morally sound actions.

The current "world order" fails on both counts. The UN, despite granting every sort of humanistic "right," leads the way in promoting abortion, population control, liberal bioethics, and euthanasia. It advances a culture of death, not one of life. In addition, in its missions and administration it has shown itself to be utterly corrupt from top to bottom. It is not worthy of the world's trust, which any government needs to function effectively.

In his own way, Benedict is calling for a moral, social, and political order that can only be fulfilled by the Kingdom of God, the only world government that has the moral authority and power to make the necessary changes that will bring about peace, prosperity, and life. As Sylva explains, "Now, in his teaching role as pope, Benedict is not simply protesting but offering the Christian alternative. . . ." The Catholic Church and the churches of God certainly have differing views on how it will come about, but at least in theory we agree that the only acceptable and workable world government is a truly moral and righteous one.

We can all be thankful that that government is coming soon (Revelation 22:20). This world certainly needs it.

Commencement 2007

Listen (RealAudio)

The news this morning is that today is Graduation Day at Virginia Tech, and the reporters covering the story are probing just how different this day will be from other commencement exercises in years past. Though only a handful of the victims of the April 16 mass murder would have graduated this year, the university is planning to honor the 27 student victims with posthumous degrees, and class rings will be given to their families. Security will be a primary concern for attendees.

However, many other universities, colleges, and high schools will be graduating millions of students over the course of the next month. These young people will be "commencing" their adult lives, beginning new careers, starting families, and launching out into a world of both opportunity and danger. Yet, the graduating members of the class of 2007 need more than a pep talk to prompt their charge onto the field of their future endeavors—they need a sober, eye-opening vision of reality. Thus:

Congratulations, graduates! You are to be commended for fulfilling the requirements of the degree program in your chosen area of study. All those late nights of cramming have paid off! You have accomplished a worthy goal.

However, despite the thousands of dollars you and/or your parents have paid for this slip of parchment, despite the midnight oil you probably burned from time to time, despite the mounds of pizza boxes and cans of Red Bull you likely added to our nation's landfills, despite the ill health you may have suffered as a result, you must let go of much of what you learned and experienced in this institution of learning and start from scratch.

That may seem rather harsh and to diminish what you have accomplished—and it may be a bit of hyperbole—but it reflects cold reality. Your modern, cutting-edge, progressive education is not really worth all that much over the long haul. Sure, it will probably help you to land a job, and the technical skills and the raw facts you learned will be of some benefit in that job, but just about everything else has been fairly worthless.

Now, I can see that you are either shocked or unbelieving, and that is to be expected. You have been taught not to accept this at my say-so. Nevertheless, should we ever meet again, say forty years down the line, I hope that you will let me know whether I was right or not. Perhaps by that time we will both be wise enough to have realized the whole truth about life.

Today is Commencement Day, and that means "the day of beginning." Everything up to now has been preparation for beginning adult life with the tools to succeed in it. You have been taught facts, figures, skills, techniques, perspectives, and methodologies. By graduating, you have proven to your teachers that you have a passable grasp on the subjects they have taught you.

But this is America 2007. Our public schools and most of our colleges and universities are entirely secular in philosophy. They are a hodge-podge of ideas and theories and assumptions, and 99 percent of them have their origins in the minds of men. Your professors and teachers have fed you a load of humanism from kindergarten to your final exam before this momentous day of achievement. What you have learned, then, is as finite and as flawed as humanity itself. Man's knowledge and ideas can reach only as high as man and no farther. Alone, mankind cannot break through the glass ceiling of his own limitations.

Sadly, your education has not prepared you for life. It may have prepared you for a job, but life? Hardly. Is life a job? What a poor life that would be! Life is not a career, a skill, a profession, or any kind of way of making a living. Yet, that is all a secular education can provide. It does not have the stature to go beyond material knowledge, beyond the skills of mind or hand.

As others have noted, the schools of this nation have closed, locked, and barred the door to the one Person who could teach this truly "higher learning." Of course, I am speaking of God Himself. The apostle Paul informs us that the natural man apart from God can only know the things of men—physical, material, technical knowledge. If we desire to know truly useful and eternal things—knowledge, understanding, and wisdom about the "big questions" of life—they have to be revealed by God through His Spirit. Otherwise, the answers to those "big questions" remain sealed between the covers of a closed Book.

Can I let you in on a secret? We call this a "commencement," and think of it as the end of a period of preparation for life—and it is. But the truth is that all of life is a time of preparation; we are preparing for real, eternal life. What we do in this life readies us for everlasting life as children of God in His Kingdom. Our experiences, beliefs, and practices will shape our characters and forge our destinies beyond this mortal coil.

If God is beginning to work with us, this knowledge should begin to rearrange our thinking and reprioritize our goals. Suddenly, a sheepskin diploma does not possess the value it may have had just minutes ago. It has its own worth, a material importance, but it pales beside the value of things like a relationship with God, a loving spouse, a close family, personal integrity, self-control, a sterling reputation, and a sound mind. These are the bones of real life, and the diploma and the job are merely means to put food on the table, clothes in the closet, and a roof over our heads.

With these thoughts in mind, we can leave here with new resolution to begin preparing for life. Yes, you heard me right. This commencement is just the end of the first semester, as it were, in our lives of education and preparation for real life. If we study hard, do our exercises, and pass our tests, true commencement will take place on some future day when we hear the great Chancellor of the Universe say in the hearing of all, "Well done, good and faithful servant!"

Evaluating Culture

Listen (RealAudio)

In listening to a series of 48 lectures by University of California at Berkeley Professor Robert Greenberg titled "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" (one of the Great Courses offered by The Teaching Company), I have come to a greater realization of the evolving tastes among consumers of Western music. We ignorantly call all orchestral music "classical," when in fact there are a handful of long periods in which such music took quite different forms, for instance, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc. It does not take a specially trained ear to distinguish the differences between works from these periods. A Bach fugue sounds nothing like a Chopin mazurka.

As one would expect, between eras were transition periods of varying lengths due to the fact that audiences took time to accept new forms. Younger composers, feeling constrained by the strictures of their elders, experimented with new, then-cutting-edge musical styles, and when their works premiered, the critics and most of their audiences were aghast at their progressive, offensive music. Such was the reaction to what are now much-loved favorites as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Berlioz's First Symphony (Fantastíque), and Brahms' First Symphony. These three masters were criticized roundly for their "grotesque" and "incomprehensible" themes. Even the universally admired Haydn incurred the wrath of the public and critics when his "Surprise" Symphony was too startling for his audience. To us, the "surprise" is just a loud, sudden chord, but to the audience of his day, it was as shocking as the jarring clatter of a jackhammer.

We would probably have a similar reaction at the cinema if we had bought a ticket to see Bambi, were comfortably ensconced in our seats, bag of popcorn and drink in hand, and suddenly were assaulted by the opening blare of a Star Wars movie. If our tastes had been trained to enjoy benign, pastoral, gentle films like Benji or Black Beauty, the dynamics and themes of a dramatic space adventure—not to mention the brassy music—would be jolting and uncomfortable. We might learn to enjoy it over time, but our initial reaction would be negative.

Literature has suffered similar periods of great change, in which venerable authors—from our point of view—broke new ground and faced vilification for it. Even today, Mark Twain is excoriated for his realistic portrayal of relations between whites and blacks in Huckleberry Finn. William Wordsworth's poetry was considered by some to be essentially unreadable when first published. Edgar Allen Poe's works, most of them macabre, were—in some cases, literally—on the bleeding-edge of acceptability during his lifetime. Several great works of literature (by esteemed authors like Geoffrey Chaucer, James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Hardy, Voltaire—even Hans Christian Andersen!), thought to be tame by modern standards, were condemned as obscene when they first went on sale.

However, things changed drastically in the twentieth century, especially after World War I. Artistic standards began to stretch beyond the suggestive to the explicit, and not just in sexual terms. While there had always been composers, authors, and graphic artists who strayed into pornographic, occult, or other taboo areas, their works had remained essentially private, for society as a whole maintained respectable limits on what it considered to be proper. Yet, after the First World War, these limits began to crumble in one area after another until today, when anything goes. While society still uses ratings of one sort or another to inform the public about artistic content, there are few societal impediments to restrict either their creation or consumption. Really, how vigilant is the local theater in keeping young teens from seeing R-rated movies? Or the local merchant in keeping them from buying M-rated video games?

In the end, the answer to this problem of down-spiraling artistic and cultural standards is a spiritual one, of course. The prevalent philosophy in the Western world—one that has been dominant since at least the Enlightenment—is humanistic liberalism. This is the intersection of two major ideas: 1) that man is the center and height of all that is, and 2) all men should be free to do as their conscience dictates. From this, it is easy to trace a direct line to today's general consensus that there are no real absolutes, so each person is free to believe and do whatever satisfies him.

This obviously flies in the face of biblical morality. These two philosophies are incompatible, and thus the more pleasing to mankind's nature has become dominant, leaving God's standards behind as "outmoded," "archaic," and "unrealistic." Under humanistic liberalism, cultural standards exist on a sliding scale, depending on the tastes of the individual. In the end, this means that there are no standards.

To Christians, however, the exact opposite is true: We have a set of absolute, eternal standards, which are provided to us in the form of principles in God's Word. By them, we can judge artistic achievements on their true merits. In music, we can judge more accurately if a piece is uplifting, hopeful, harmonious, helpful, etc., applying the principles of the fruit of God's Spirit. We can judge literature by these same principles, plus those found in God's commandments. (And by the way, just because a piece of literature contains, say, a murder does not mean that it is immoral. We have to go beyond this to see how the work resolves the sinful act and the circumstances it causes. If we were to do otherwise, we would have to condemn the Bible itself, as it contains murders, adulteries, incest, lying, stealing, coveting—you name it!) These same standards can be applied to the graphic arts too.

Learning godly judgment is no easy thing. It is an acquired skill. But God has called us to learn how to judge righteously. As our Savior commands, "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment" (John 7:24). How do we do this? Jesus answers, "My judgment is righteous, because I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me" (John 5:30). As we strengthen and deepen our relationship with God, our judgment of these cultural phenomena will improve—we will be able to discern what is truly classic.

Society of Skeptics

The last few issues of Biblical Archeology Review (BAR) have reminded me why I cancelled my subscription in frustration several years ago. Whether it is an article on who "the disciple whom Jesus loved" was or one about the possibility of a clay tablet hoard at Hazor, the magazine's authors take their jibes at the Bible's historical veracity. And this is in a magazine that purports to defend biblical archeology! However, it is clear that BAR is really a supporter of archeology in Bible lands, not the Bible itself. Its editors and authors are clearly more driven by current scientific thought and attitudes than in any kind of faithful defense of God's Word. In fact, they would probably take umbrage at describing the Bible as God's Word.

BAR does not stand alone, by any means. It could be lumped into a huge class of institutions that have Christian or Jewish roots and links but are actually humanist and scientific in their approaches to their fields of endeavor. In other words, while pretending to be religious or at least supportive of the religions to which they are connected, they are really skeptical, liberal organizations. They present a veneer of faith but at heart are agnostic, and thus they express doubt about the historicity and reliability of the Bible. In reality, they dismiss its authority.

For example, Joshua's account of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites lists the towns that were conquered, some of which were burned and some of which were not. It is all very straightforward. According to their own scientific surveys and digs, archeologists know that many of the same towns suffered burning during the late fifteenth or the early fourteenth century BC. However, these same towns are not known to have been burned in the thirteenth century, when modern critical scholars say Israel came into the land. These scholars, then, assume that Joshua's account is wrong. They say what probably happened is that the author (not Joshua, of course), writing long afterward, either made up which towns were burned, or because local history remembered that certain towns had been burned in conquest in the distant past, applied those conflagrations to Joshua's conquest, when in fact they belonged to an earlier destruction.

Their first instinct is to call God a liar! His Word through Joshua is unreliable as a historical account of events during Israel's return to Palestine. These are the actions of skeptics.

Someone who really had faith in God's Word, though, would look at it the other way around. He would reason, "The archeological record shows that there is no burn level at city X for the thirteenth century BC. The Bible says there should be. This means one of three things: 1) Our dating of this level is wrong. 2) The Israelites did not invade during the thirteenth century (late date) but in the late fifteenth or early fourteenth century (early date) when a burn level exists. Or, 3) the biblical account is wrong." A biblical scholar would at least give the Bible the benefit of the doubt.

Another example of Bible-bashing is a recent "discovery" published in a Canadian scientific journal that Jesus did not walk on the water of the Sea of Galilee but strode confidently across on ice. Seriously! A news account of their findings reports:

A research team of oceanographers from Florida State University, Colombia University in New York and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said it has found data to refute the biblical account. . . . The study said there was a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions for the development of a unique freezing phenomenon that the researchers called "springs ice." During the time of Jesus—when the temperature in the region was several degrees colder than it is today—this type of ice could have occurred every 100 or so years. . . . It would have been difficult to distinguish such an ice patch floating on the surface of the small lake from the unfrozen water surrounding it along the lake's western shore in Tabgha—the area of the lake where many archeological finds from the time of Jesus have been documented.

Clearly, it was their intention to debunk the Bible's account because they are unwilling to admit that miracles happened—and perhaps, that God exists. The end of the article says that this same group came up with another scheme to disprove the parting of the Red Sea. Obviously, they are skeptics.

What is so maddening is that these broadcasters of doubt are part of the mainstream of our society. The media pick up these stories and spread them as "truth" over their airwaves, often in accepting tones. Few rise up to defend the faith, and those who do are shot down with barbed labels like "fundamentalist," "right-winger," or "extremist." Even "biblical literalist" has become a bad word among the postmodern, tolerant set.

This phenomenon is not just confined to biblical studies, either. On college campuses, conservative political and cultural opinion is often not even allowed to be presented, as it is considered so reactionary as to be ridiculous and unworthy of discussion. Therefore, what passes for debate on college campuses is really friendly argument between progressives who differ only by degree. For example, Roe v. Wade is allowed to be debated only between those who favor it in the first trimester and those who favor it throughout pregnancy. Those who desire to have it overturned are considered Neanderthals.

It comes down to this: We are living in a post-Christian culture, even here in America. Despite three-quarters of Americans claiming to be Christian, this nation has moved beyond belief into doubt. Most would probably say they believe, but their behavior belies their profession of faith. For real Christians, this means we face a steadily diminishing influence on the course of this nation's culture. The optimist in me shouts that, if we stand strong, we will eventually turn matters to God's favor, but the more pessimistic side says that it will probably take Christ's return to set matters straight. I am leaning pessimistic.